Beast operates a car-sharing platform. Fleet partners list cars; verified drivers rent them by the hour, day, or longer. This page summarises the controls Beast applies before, during, and after every rental, so prospective partners can understand the assurances built into the platform.
Everything below reflects what is running in production today. Each layer is enforced on our servers, not in the mobile app, so the checks cannot be bypassed from a phone.
Beast does not rely on a single gate. Each layer below asks a different question, and a failure at any layer stops the rental.
Beast partners with a regulated, EU-based identity verification provider. Before a driver can ever rent, they upload a government-issued ID (passport, national ID, or driving licence), then prove they are the person in the document with a live face capture. The document is checked for authenticity. The face match is biometric.
Name, date of birth, document expiry, licence category, and issuing country are extracted as structured fields, not free text. Beast itself does not keep the raw scans. We keep the verification outcome and a reference back to the original session so any later review can be tied back to it.
A driver cannot start a rental until they hold a current, approved verification. This is enforced at the rental-start API itself, not just in the mobile app.
Identity is one half of “may this person drive this car.” The driving licence is the other.
If a licence is renewed or anything material changes, the driver is required to re-verify before their next rental.
All card processing runs through Stripe. Beast itself never stores raw card data; sensitive payment material lives inside the PCI-compliant processor. Partner payouts run through Stripe Connect.
For each rental, the platform:
Partial captures are supported, so if there is damage or a fee owed, Beast captures exactly the agreed amount from the held deposit rather than re-charging the driver from scratch. Every payment state change is logged and reconcilable.
Vehicles are unlocked and locked through the manufacturer's fleet API, with credentials managed per-vehicle on Beast's backend. The driver's app never holds the keys directly. Every unlock or lock is an authenticated command issued by Beast.
The encryption keys used to protect vehicle credentials at rest are kept outside the application code, in environment-managed secret storage.
For supported vehicles, Beast ingests a continuous telemetry stream throughout the rental. The platform observes location, heading, speed, odometer, battery state, charging state, shift position, and door lock status, at minimum.
The same data feeds operational monitoring. If a car is parked outside its allowed return zone, Beast notices. If a rental is being ended with the car still charging, Beast notices. Every datapoint is stored per vehicle and tied to the rental in progress, so any later review has a precise record of what the car was doing.
Beast runs a multi-signal risk assessment when a rental is booked, and again at sensitive transitions, particularly the unlock. Without exposing the specific rules, the platform looks at signals such as:
When a rental looks higher-risk, Beast can require a live biometric re-authentication before continuing, or route the case to a human reviewer. Low-risk rentals proceed unimpeded. The aim is to keep the everyday driver experience friction-free while raising the bar precisely where it matters.
Driver accounts are backed by Firebase Authentication. Tokens are validated server-side on every request.
Operator (back-office) accounts use single sign-on as the primary path, with a tightly scoped email and password fallback restricted to an explicit whitelist. Passwords are stored using a modern, salted hash.
Authorisation is role-based. Operator users see only what their role permits, and sensitive actions (refunds, manual overrides, vehicle commands) are logged. API keys, vehicle credentials, encryption keys, and third-party tokens all live in a dedicated secret manager, scoped per environment, never in the codebase.
Every rental, payment, verification, and risk decision emits a structured event onto an internal pub-sub bus. These events are consumed by:
The audit trail for any given rental, “what was checked, when, and what was the outcome,” is reconstructable end to end. Recovery from transient failures (a third-party timeout, a brief outage) is automatic rather than manual. Errors are captured in Sentry with full context. Critical conditions page the on-call team.
Vehicle insurance is arranged and maintained by the partner. Beast does not bind coverage on the partner's behalf. Partners are responsible for ensuring their policy is valid for short-term rental use in the relevant market.
What Beast contributes to that relationship is evidence: a precise record of who drove the car, when, between which locations, and under what conditions. Rental start and end timestamps, verified driver identity, telemetry snapshots, and any flags raised during the rental are all preserved and available to the partner. Claims and incident reviews become straightforward.
Nine ordered steps, from the driver's first signup to the audit trail that outlives the rental.
There is no manual override that bypasses identity, licence, and payment checks at the same time.
Damage and fees can be captured against it without needing to chase the driver.
Start and end states, telemetry, payments, and any flags raised along the way are all preserved.
When risk signals fire, the platform escalates rather than waving the rental through.
We're happy to walk through any specific area during partner onboarding, share architecture detail under NDA, or answer your insurer's questions directly.